Summary

Jeff Atwood reflects on two deeply personal topics: the recent passing of his father and the lasting legacy of Stack Overflow. He shares that he's grateful he reordered his GMI rural study counties so he could visit his father one last time in October 2025. He then pivots to thanking every Stack Overflow contributor, arguing that LLMs fundamentally depend on the high-quality, community-built Q&A dataset from Stack Overflow. He warns that if AI companies hollow out the communities that produce their training data, they will destroy the very foundation their products rely on. The post closes with a heartfelt expression of gratitude to his community.

Key Insight

The human communities that built the open programming knowledge base powering today's AI are irreplaceable, and AI companies that undermine those communities will destroy the very foundation their products depend on.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 3

  There is no loss, because nothing ever ends.

• 6

  We won capitalism, then went back to help improve it for everyone.

• 7

  LLMs basically could not code at all without access to the extremely high quality creative commons programming Q&A dataset that all of us built together at Stack Overflow.

• 4

  It is incredible what you can do with global brain statistics and a strongly curated dataset created by we, the people!

• 7

  If the LLMs end up hollowing out the very communities that produce all their training data, they're going to really, really regret that.

• 7

  Do not, for any reason, under any circumstances, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, aka the human community around your product that does all the real work.

• 3

  Just treat the community with the respect they deserve... that we all deserve.

• 2

  Thank you for being a friend, because there's no way I could have done any of this without you.

Tone

reflective, grateful, cautionary